Understanding trophic interactions in a warming world by bridging foraging ecology and biomechanics with network science

Cuff, Jordan P., Labonte, David and Windsor, Fredric ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5030-3470 2024. Understanding trophic interactions in a warming world by bridging foraging ecology and biomechanics with network science. Integrative & Comparative Biology 64 (2) , pp. 306-321. 10.1093/icb/icae070

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Abstract

Climate change will disrupt biological processes at every scale. Ecosystem functions and services vital to ecological resilience are set to shift, with consequences for how we manage land, natural resources, and food systems. Increasing temperatures cause morphological shifts, with concomitant implications for biomechanical performance metrics crucial to trophic interactions. Biomechanical performance, such as maximum bite force or running speed, determines the breadth of resources accessible to consumers, the outcome of interspecific interactions, and thus the structure of ecological networks. Climate change-induced impacts to ecosystem services and resilience are therefore on the horizon, mediated by disruption of biomechanical performance and, consequently, trophic interactions across whole ecosystems. Here, we argue that there is an urgent need to investigate the complex interactions between climate change, biomechanical traits and foraging ecology to help predict changes to ecological networks and ecosystem functioning. We discuss how these seemingly disparate disciplines can be connected through network science. Using an ant-plant network as an example, we illustrate how different data types could be integrated to investigate the interaction between warming, bite force and trophic interactions, and discuss what such an integration will achieve. It is our hope that this integrative framework will help to identify a viable means to elucidate previously intractable impacts of climate change, with effective predictive potential to guide management and mitigation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Biosciences
Subjects:	Q Science > QL Zoology
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1540-7063
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	20 June 2024
Date of Acceptance:	8 June 2024
Last Modified:	09 Oct 2024 12:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/170049

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